My research traverses the fields of film studies and anthropology, particularly along the lines of the social aesthetics and phenomenology of technology and the body. My work has appeared in PostScript, Journal of Film and Video, Film and Philosophy, AfterImage, and Medical Anthropology. My film projects have taken me to Ethiopia, Japan, Ireland, Nigeria, Italy, and India.

Soo Young Bae is interested in the far-reaching social and political impact of new communication technologies, with a particular focus on the dynamics of user interaction and information flow in social media platforms. Her program of research explores how the flow of news and information becomes increasingly ingrained in existing social relationships, and how it shapes our attitudes, behaviors, and relation to one another.

My research focuses on language, culture, and social identities, particularly ethnicity and race. I am interested in negotiations of meaning and social identity in face-to-face interaction, particularly in intercultural contexts. My publications include Language, Race, and Negotiation of Identity: A Study of Dominican Americans and various articles and chapters on race, code switching, bilingualism, immigration, intercultural communication, names, and street remarks.View and download Benjamin Bailey publications here.Download information about our graduate focal area in Social Interaction and Culture here.

My research interests are focused on comprehensive media literacy, especially integrating media literacy into the primary and secondary school classroom. I co-run Mass Media Literacy, a grassroots organization the supports legislation for teacher training in media literacy and builds curriculum for comprehensive media literacy across K-12 public schools in Massachusetts. My upper-level Comm classes all come with a civic engagement component where students have the opportunity to work in the community and across the state with and on behalf of young people and their media learning. I work with homeschool, alternative school, and public school students on media literacy education. I have published two books on bringing media literacy to the curriculum and its implications: Media Literacy Goes to School (Peter Lang, 2010) and Majoring in Change (Peter Lang, 2012).

My research interests include the study of digital media and telecommunication policy, Latina/ethnic media studies, and global communications. My work promotes "engaged scholarship" and aims to address inequality, power, community voices, and the role of intersectionalities in shaping media and cultural spaces. My recent co-edited books are: Mothers in Academia (2013, Columbia University Press) and Soap Operas and Telenovelas in the Digital Age: Global Industries and New Audiences (2011, Peter Lang Publishers).

As a faculty member, I am also affiliated with the Center for Latin American, Caribbean and Latina/o Studies; Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies; and the School of Public Policy.

Core faculty member in the Interdepartmental Program in Film Studies and Coordinator of the Graduate Certificate in Film Studies. For more details about the Graduate Certificate in Film Studies and the Interdepartmental Program in Film please see www.umass.edu/film.

My current and ongoing research interests are focused on international cinema, primarily non-western cinema (Cinemas of the Global South)--especially Arab, Asian, and African cinema; international co-productions; diasporic audiences; international transmedia stardom and celebrity; international film festivals; Afropop and Arabpop music and film; intercultural film/video and multimedia installations by women. My writing has appeared in the following academic journals and arts publications: Afterimage, Asian Cinema, Asian Journal of Communication, Cinema Journal, Cinemaya, Film Quarterly, History, Journal of Film and Video, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, Literature/Film Quarterly, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Spectator: Journal of Film and Television Criticism, Tamkang Review, Velvet Light Trap, and others. My authored or coauthored articles have been published in the anthologies Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (New York University Press, 2007), Global Currents: Media and Technology Now (Rutgers University Press, 2004), Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers (Routledge, 2002, and the 2nd edition Fifty Contemporary Film Directors, 2010), Transnational Chinese Cinemas (University of Hawaii, 1997), and others. I am also editor of the book Contemporary Asian Cinema: Popular Culture in a Global Frame (Berg, 2006) and a special issue of the journal Quarterly Review of Film and Video on the International Film Star (Volume 19.1, 2002).

My research interests revolve around power, identity, body, food and culture, particularly as they are connected to discourse and performance. I generally situate my research in the context of social justice, critical pedagogy and community activism. My work has appeared in feminist, community service learning, communication, education, performance, mediation and development communication journals and in books dealing with topics such as whiteness studies, food studies, meda literacy, intercultural communication, communication education, communication activism, ethics and new media. Of particular concern in my work are the performances and spaces in which bodies are identified and legislated as raced, gendered, classed, etc.

My research interests are at the intersection of culture, social interaction, and the media. I study both media depictions of interaction and interaction in everyday life. Most recently, I studied Israeli call-in radio and am now expanding my work to U.S. political talk radio, including the "notorious" Rush Limbaugh. I am also interested in television (e.g., The Daily Show with Jon Stewart) and other arenas of public participation, such as internet commentary and new call-in formats. I have a big corpus of transcribed and untranscribed interactions about politics, finances, personal topics and sports.

I am looking for graduate students who are interested in financial discourse, political discourse and sports and civic participation in the media in general. Additionally, I am looking for Israeli students who would like to study interactions in Hebrew.

Fuentes-Bautista’s research focuses on social stratification of digital media systems, and the role of advocacy networks, media activism, and media reform movements in shaping media democracy and digital inclusion efforts in the U.S. and Latin America. Her areas of interest include: digital media and social inequality; digital media policy; media reform and justice movements; community broadband and digital inclusion; empowerment evaluation and participatory action research.

My work has been informed by political economy/ecology, the study of cultural production and reception, and coloniality. This has involved three areas of focus: 1) the role of cultural industries and information technologies in the mediation of society, particularly in Latin America, 2) communication as a contested site of representation, subjectivity and governance, and, 3) lived experience. Publications include co-edited books on communication, cultural policies and social change in Latina America, as well as essays in a number of collections and journals such as Organization, Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, Journal of Film and Video, Comunicacion y Sociedad, and Passages.

Currently active as a documentary film producer/director. Areas of filmmaking interest include the environment, the American counter-culture, and spirituality. Previously - award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker.

My research lies at the intersection of folklore studies, rhetorical studies, and performance studies. I am interested in two general issues: the promotion of a critical folklore studies as an activist scholarship to examine and redress social injustice, with particular attention to the constitutive nature of expressive culture; and the relationship between rhetorical criticism and social theory, especially to critique anti-democratic behavior and to advocate democratic modes of living with others.

Working at these intersections, my research often focuses on the ways that contemporary comedic and horror performances address, uphold, and criticize social and political anxieties. Similarly, I am interested in the complicated role alcohol plays in human culture and history. Occasionally, I investigate myths of rhetoric in classical antiquity in order to include voices and concepts often excluded from the rhetorical tradition. And since 2014, I have been engaged in research on the historical folklore of the Connecticut River Valley, as well as the entire state of Connecticut.

Seth K. Goldman, Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, teaches and conducts research on the effects of mass media and political communication on stereotyping and prejudice, particularly in the context of public opinion about race, gender, and sexual orientation. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of Communication and the Commonwealth Honors College.

Goldman is the author, with Diana Mutz, of The Obama Effect: How the 2008 Campaign Changed White Racial Attitudes (Russell Sage Foundation, 2014), which won the Frank Luther Mott-Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award for the best research-based book on journalism/mass communication published in 2014. In addition, his work has been published or is forthcoming in academic journals such as the American Journal of Political Science,Journal of Politics, Political Communication, Political Psychology, andPublic Opinion Quarterly.

Financial support for Goldman's research has been provided by the Russell Sage Foundation and from the NSF-funded Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS), from whom he was a winner of the 2013 Special Competition for Young Investigators. He was also research fellow with the Face Value Project, funded by the Ford Foundation, and in partnership with the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Prior to joining the faculty at UMass Amherst, Goldman was the George Gerbner Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

My research interests include cultural production, sexual representation, feminist media studies, and cultural studies of social class, with essays in a number of collections and such journals as Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, the International Journal of Communication, Signs, Journal of Communication, GLQ, Feminist Media Studies, and Screen. In most projects, these categories combine and redefine each other while addressing questions of personal, community and institutional power and autonomy. My work also addresses questions of feeling, identification and everyday life, in the interest of studying communication practices in as deeply and broadly contextualized a way as I can, and in the spirit--when it makes sense--of optimism and social solidarity. New projects on artist/scholar collaboration and on friendship as political form speak to those questions and commitments. Love and Money: Queers, Class and Cultural Production, a 2014 finalist in LGBT Studies for a Lambda Literary Award, is available from NYU Press. For a podcast interview about Love and Money, visit Books Aren't Dead at the Fembot Collective: http://fembotcollective.org/blog/2016/06/06/books-arent-dead-bad-intervi...

I am interested in popular culture and media from the interdependent perspectives of critical cultural studies and political economy. While my focus is advertising and consumer culture, I am broadly concerned with ideology, consciousness, and politics. I have been involved in many book projects as author and editor, though currently my research is expressed in the form of educational video through my work with the Media Education Foundation.

I’ve been with the department since 1998. In the early 1990s I received my PhD in Communication and for a few years was a nomad professor teaching courses in media and cultural studies. Prior to that, I worked for 13 years at the Rutgers University Office of Television and Radio in the production of public affairs and instructional programming that was aired on cable stations, New Jersey Public TV, WNET New York, and other public TV stations around the nation.

From the intersection of race, gender, and class, to name a few, I write Performance Autoethnographies looking at words, knowledge, concepts, and actions, which expose differences and also shape, marked bodies into the world. From a present space created by a deep immersion in the past, I attempt to challenge the white man's ideology, trying to create a transformative action, a performative space, whose goal is to bring more justice and dignity to more people. My work can be found at Studies in Symbolic Interaction, International Review of Qualitative Research, Qualitative Inquiry, and Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies. My book, co-authored with Marcelo Diversi, Betweener Talk: Decolonizing Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Praxis (Left Coast Press, 2009), is a postcolonial and polyvocal construction of a scholarship committed to combat racism, sexism, and classism in modern America society. This is what I want to do with my scholarship; to engage in other postcolonial/polyvocal projects with his students, colleagues in and with the community where I live and labor.

My research interests fall under the general heading of "film and society." These interests, which overlap to some extent, include the film representation of people with physical disabilities, the film/TV construction of evil, early women filmmakers and their productions, selected Disney films, and vintage horror films. My work has been published in such journals as Journal of Film and Video, Wide Angle, Film & History, Film Criticism, Leonardo, Paradoxa, Offscreen, and Millennium Film Journal and in numerous anthologies and encyclopedias. Virtually all of my scholarly work has addressed various intersections of film and society from historical perspectives.

The central concern of my work is the ethics of media, which I approach as the moral and social consequences of media and communication technologies in the everyday lives of minority groups and vulnerable communities, especially those in the global South. Two interrelated strands of research extend from this concern: 1) the first is on media witnessing and the moral responsibilities of media institutions, media workers, and media audiences to vulnerable others; 2) the second is on vulnerable communities and their uses of digital media for voice and participation, everyday sociality, and coping or healing. My research develops an ethnographic and decolonial approach that sensitively embeds media practice within rich local histories and ordinary motivations while engaging with normative debates about media justice and cosmopolitan ethics in complex multicultural societies.

I have published extensively in the areas of global media; disasters, development and humanitarian communication; ethnography of social media; creative and digital labor; mediated protest, witnessing and solidarities; and ethics of communication. I have supervised PhD students working in the areas of media in everyday life among Nigerian migrants in London, digital protest in class-divided Thailand, and Belgian audiences of distant suffering. I welcome grad students working in these research areas. Prior to joining UMass Amherst, I was Associate Professor in the University of Leicester and Assistant Professor in Hong Kong Baptist University.

I am the founder and convenor of the British Council-funded Newton Tech4Dev Network, which is a global network of academics, humanitarians, and technology experts, studying emergent media in low- and middle-income countries. I lead the research strand on "Architects of Networked Disinformation: Behind the Scenes of Troll Accounts and Fake News Production in the Philippines" and 2) entertainment media and convivial culture following events of rupture, drawing from case studies on the European refugee crisis and post-Katrina New Orleans.

As a scholar-performer I am interested in narrative performance that gets at constructions and embodiments of identity and relations. When someone tells their story in public—in particular those stories that do not circulate in mainstream culture—to an audience of self, an/other, or many in a performance space, connections and potentials can be revealed, made, even undone. In doing and telling we might find alliance, coalition, and other unknowns that differences in and discourses of race, gender, sexuality, class, and nation often preclude. Performance is rife with possibility as well as danger. It is a site we can simultaneously reinforce and interrupt that which constrains and produces us; it is a site where resistance, decolonial practice, and social justice are sparked, realized, begun. My traditional and performance scholarship can be found in Text and Performance Quarterly, QED: A Journal of Queer Worldmaking, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, and in several edited volumes. I was part of an author team that published Queer Praxis: Questions for LGBT Worldmaking. My current projects include a performance piece about desire and queer relations and a book monograph on queer intimacy.

Whether through research, teaching, or directing the Department's advising program, I see my work as a vehicle for prompting critical thought and promoting constructive social change. My research interests include the subjective and social implications of media images hypermasculinity and the hypersexualization of young girls, the commercialization of children's culture, and the health and environmental impacts of media driven consumerism. My current research explores consent and coercion in adolescents' and young women's sexual experiences, focusing on the roles of pornography and other media messages in college students' experiences and perceptions of "hooking up." I am also studying the impacts of Title IX and other campus rape policies on feminist pedagogy, research, and advocacy. My scholarship sits at the nexus of social and developmental psychology, critical cultural studies, and feminist media studies, with a particular focus on issues of gender, race, class, and sexuality.

My research interests include critical pedagogy, media literacy, contemporary and historical movements for social justice, the cyber-commons and links between grassroots and online activism, blogging and YouTube as classroom curricular outcomes, youth and the entertainment industries, Indy media, and the ethnography of Yiddish culture and Jewish radicalism. Through artist-educator media literacy residencies, I’ve worked with students and teachers in DYS youth detention facilities and local middle and high schools.

My research interests involve the study of media content, opinions of media, media effects, and media literacy, particularly regarding gender and violence. My work has appeared in Communication Research, Human Communication Research, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, and Media Psychology. I've co-authored three books with first author, George Comstock, including Media and the American Child (Elsevier, 2007) in which we provide a critical synthesis and review of the children and media literature. My edited collection Media Effects/Media Psychology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), part of the International Encyclopledia of Media Studies, provides a state-of-the-art review of the field. Particular emphases in my work include media depictions of masculinity, the third-person effect and other opinions about media influence, and the ways that early adolescents respond to media literacy curricula.

My research interests include the cultural history of film, television, and media; the social and institutional constructions of the media audience; genre theory and screen genres; and screen industries. My work focuses on the value and meanings created at the conjuncture of cultural, institutional, and textual practice. My book Television in Transition: The Life and Afterlife of the Narrative Action Hero(Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) combines and connects analysis of the contemporary television industry with close readings of four individual programs to explain how innovation takes place and meaning is produced amidst changing institutional configurations. My work has also appeared in Cultural Studies, Social Semiotics, American Quarterly, Feminist Media Histories, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and such collections as Media and Public Spheres (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), the Handbook of Media Audiences (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), and the Routledge Companion to Global Popular Culture (Routledge, 2015).

My general research interests include deliberation, conflict management, social identity, culture, communication design, and the coordination of actions in personal and public contexts. Of particular interest is how a specific form of interactivity is constructed through the use of language, argument, interactional resources, in view of different constraints the interaction imposes; what is the interrelationship of reasoning and activity, how this activity is constitutive of identity, and what are culturally-specific and context-specific practices. My recent research investigated the construction of deliberative activity in the course of dispute mediation.

My research interests are in the areas of promotional culture, media and cultural studies of health, qualitative research methods, and gender and performance. I'm the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture (Routledge, 2013), and my publications about consumer culture appear in Popular Communication, Feminist Media Studies, Journal of Consumer Culture, and International Journal of Cultural Studies. A collaborative project on American cheerleading has been published in Social Problems and Text & Performance Quarterly. My current research considers how health care is framed as a consumer issues, particularly in the United States in reform discourse.